These madcap sex comedies can be best described as a Benny Hill spy skit stretched out to fill TWO feature length films. The under-cranked (sped up) chase scenes are intact, but instead of skimpy outfits we have lots of naked ladies and a liberal dose of hard X scenes. Like Benny Hill shows, the cast is mostly the same, but their roles are interchangeable. Ole Søltoft stars as Jensen in both films. He’s the spitting image of Benny Hill, but his acting style is much more restrained. He also performs hard core.

Scorpio was first, Sagittarius was the sequel / remake. This reviewer preferred the latter and will focus on that film.

Sagittarius starts out with a strong beginning, and the exercise room scenes toward the end must be seen to be believed. Nevertheless, it makes critical mistakes that almost sink it including the following: Ole is sidelined, the chief is sidelined, and their replacements are extremely irritating. Dom Deluise could have made the head of operations dressed as Sir Walter Raleigh shtick work, but it would have taken a unique talent that is sorely not present here for this idiotic concept to work. There are more attempts at sketch type humor than in the original and dwarf Torben Bille (The Sinful Dwarf) gets to ham it up more.

The best performances in Sagittarius are by the cast who perform the explicit sex scenes. They turn in better non-sex performances than their non-participatory cohorts. Maybe there was a limelight syndrome at hand that caused the prudent to overact by an exponential amount. It is in fact the sex scenes that save Sagittarius. We see the best (and shamefully underused) actors suddenly go down dirty – it’s a surprise. The scenes are not loops spliced in and there are no inserts. The scenes are very naturalistic and somewhat relevant to the plot, and the babes are every one drool worthy. The scenes are inventive and varied. But here comes another critical mistake: they are chopped up and inter-cut with endless minutes of tomfoolery. Why couldn’t we have them edited intact as an extra? They are culturally significant as remnants of the last gasp of sex in a film rather than sex as a film. They are impressive in execution but butchered in the editing room.

The DVD:

This double feature is a repackaging in a single double disk (front/back) keepcase. Paradoxically, the sequel is listed first headlining the original. Please refer to the original reviews for more product detail.

It might just depend on which one you view first as to which you prefer, since the other will definitely be a case of ‘been there, done that’. Still, both features have their moments and preserve their moment in time.